October 05, 2006

Quantifying the Benefits of Cyberinfrastructure

We need to find a way of quantifying the benefits of "cyberinfrastructure"--the technology that underpins and enables eScience. We need this information if we are to justify spending on infrastructure (or not), decide what infrastructure to build, and understand how to improve the infrastructures that we have.

But quantifying benefits is hard.

An anecdote: In building the Globus-based Earth System Grid (ESG: see the picture for participating sites) we put a lot of effort into
instrumentation and quantifying usage. Thus we can know
that our more than 3000 registered users have downloaded more than 100 Terabytes of climate
simulation data. Yet this data does not provide any real insight into
whether the people downloading that data found it useful--or did anything useful with it. We did survey users, and got useful information, but response rates were low.